Is it just me/coincidental, or does anyone else regularly receive a bunch of infected or junk emails (often without valid return addresses) after posting here..? I assume these are coming from the annoying type of worm/virus that harvests email addresses when the forum is read on a web browser. If anyone is reading this on a Windows system of some description, and hasn't updated their antivirus software in a while, now may be a good time to do so!

-- Richard Williams (richardw@icr.ac.uk), November 05, 2001

Answers

I personally haven't received any mail like that. While nothing is certain, I don't suspect it's LUSENET or the greenspun.com domain. But it's definitely time to make sure everyone's anti-virus software is up-to-date. Virus definition files are changing frequently, and the Nimda.E virus is going around like crazy right now.

-- Tony Rowlett (rowlett@alaska.net), November 05, 2001.

I am not receiving any junk mail or mail viruses after posting here.

Cheers,

-- John Collier (jbcollier@powersurfr.com), November 05, 2001.

I have gotten several wierd e-mail over the past weeks that say something like "I really appreciate your opinion, please tell me what you think about this" with an attachment which of course I flush down the toilet right away. Unless you keep a seperate "Yahoo" or other non server email address for all your chat room internet use, you will increase your junk mail and virus vulnerability. I never ever open up an attachment unless I know its coming ahead of time.

-- Andrew Schank (aschank@flash.net), November 05, 2001.

No Sir, nothing that kind on this side . . .

Cheers

-Iván

-- Iván Barrientos M (ingenieria@simltda.tie.cl), November 05, 2001.

Interesting. I use Opera 5 as my browser. I've set it to alert me to illegal cookies and it recently warned me that this site was trying to set some. Just thought I'd pass it along. Opera is a great browser, by the way. And no, I don't work for them! www.opera.com

-- J. Rivera (jrivera@vapop.ucsd.edu), November 05, 2001.

No problems here.

-- Bob Fleischman (RFXMAIL@prodigy.net), November 05, 2001.

Andrew,

I also have received emails of the type you describe. This is a well- known trap and the attachment DEFINITELY contains a virus. Thank heavens you didn't open it!

One amusing type of junk mail I have received at least 10 times is in the form of a letter from an African country, most commonly Togoland. These letters can take varous forms but boil down to an offer to split with me an amount of US$10 million or more and requesting details of my bank account and various other things. These are not virus infected and have no attachments; they are just a scam. I've kept copies of them if anyone is interested to see one. I understand that this scam started years ago in Nigeria. I daresay, by now, various gullible recipients have replied with the requested information and have regrettd doing so.

-- Ray Moth (ray_moth@yahoo.com), November 05, 2001.

Have to agree with everybody up there: (a) I get junk every day (b) with or without attachments, if I don't recognize the sender, I don't even open the shit but flush the shit immediately (c) I've never had any junk from anybody who is on this forum (yet). Keep clean!

-- Michael Kastner (kastner@zedat.fu-berlin.de), November 05, 2001.

I set my profile to NOT automatically receive private e-mail replies for postings to my questions on this forum. I have exchanged private e-mails with several members from this forum and have not had any problems with viruses. Agree with the concept of NOT opening any attachment on e-mail if I don't recognize the sender. May your e- mails be virus free and your lenses be fungus free. :-)) LB

-- Luther Berry (lberrytx@aol.com), November 06, 2001.

Thanks for the replies - sounds like it's not a general problem with this forum. Of course any time an email address is displayed on a public webpage it's potentially visible to worms like Nimda (which search the web caches of infected systems for email addresses). So you can even be targeted if someone using an infected system happens to run a Google search for a Leica topic that returns a LUSENET thread containing your email address - in this situation it doesn't matter if the user of the compromised system actually posts here, or whether the targeted poster has elected to receive followups by email (the worm sends out infected emails by itself without the knowledge of the user). For some worms in combination with certain Windows email software and web browsers, it isn't even necessary to open an attachment manually to be infected - see for example:

http://www.cert.org/advisories/CA-2001-26.html

-- Richard Williams (richardw@icr.ac.uk), November 06, 2001.

J. Rivera:

Photonet will attempt to download a cookie when you log-on. You don't need to accept it to use the site.

One thing to look for are dot-gif files. These don't go into the cookie file. On a mac they go to your designated download site. On windows they go to a file folder [I have forgotten which one]. There were a lot for a while and then they seemed to have disappeared. The ones that I have seen aren't dangerous.

Worm in the title is possible with Outlook because of the run-on nature. Not much room for anything serious that I am aware of.

Art

-- Art (AKarr90975@aol.com), November 06, 2001.

I have recived trash in my hotmail count, but can´t confirm where it cames from, but this is the only site I use. Any way I try to leave it to antiviruses programs.

-- r watson (al1231234@hotmail.com), November 06, 2001.

I also got a load of massages with the "I am some prince from Nigeria" Yada Yada Yada. What I can't figure out is how anyone with an IQ over 50 could be stupid enough to actually reply to a single spam message from the "lose weight", "make a million dollars", "Refinance your house", "accept credit cards" etc etc. The worst spam I got so far was send to me from myself-some bastard was using my email address to harrass thousands of web users.

-- Andrew Schank (aschank@flash.net), November 06, 2001.